Trump scores major win against corrupt financial agency

A district court on Friday upheld President Donald Trump’s decision to axe the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a rogue financial agency that has been accused of widespread corruption.

The CFPB, founded by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), sets its own budget and is paid directly by the Federal Reserve, bypassing Congress. While it claims to safeguard the interests of consumers, the bureau has been widely criticized for exercising totalitarian control over the banking industry by stifling competition and policing non-financial businesses.

On February 1st, President Trump fired CFPB head Rohit Chopra. Acting director Russell Vought then froze CFPB operations and shut down its headquarters, sparking a lawsuit from the National Treasury Employees Union. Although Judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered the Trump administration to restart the agency, the decision was reversed last week by the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.

The CFPB is the only federal agency to bypass Congress for its funding. In October 2022, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said that this “perpetual insulation from Congress’ appropriations power, including the express exemption from congressional review of its funding, renders the Bureau ‘no longer dependent, and as a result, no longer accountable’ to the Congress and ultimately, to the people.”

How the CFPB is ‘terrorizing’ the financial industry

The Daily Wire reports that in 2015, Investor’s Business Daily accused the CFPB of “diverting potentially millions of dollars in settlement payments for alleged victims of lending bias to a slush fund for poverty groups tied to the Democratic Party” and planning to “create a so-called Civil Penalty Fund for its own shakedown operations targeting financial institutions.”

One of the tactics CFPB uses to control industries is debanking certain businesses. Crypto companies, for example, find it difficult to obtain bank accounts at major banks because of CFPB rules. Billionaire startup investor Marc Andreessen explained this to podcaster Joe Rogan in December.

“We have this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB, which is sort of Elizabeth Warren’s personal agency that she gets to control,” said Andreessen. “And it’s an independent agency that gets to run and do whatever it wants, right? And if you read the Constitution, there is no such thing as an independent agency, and yet there it is.”

Andreessen said the CFPB acts on Sen. Warren’s whim and is able to “terrorize financial institutions, prevent new competition, new startups that want to compete with the big banks . . . Just terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services.”

“This is where a lot of the debanking comes from, is these agencies,” he continued. “So debanking is when you as either a person or your company are literally kicked out of the banking system.”

The investor explained that agencies like the CFPB allow the federal government to skirt the Constitution:

This is where the government and the companies get intertwined. Back to your fascism point, which is, there’s a constitutional amendment that says the government can’t restrict your speech, but there’s no constitutional amendment that says the government can’t debank you, right? And so they, if they can’t do the one thing, they do the other thing, and then they don’t have to debank you. They just have to put pressure on the private company banks to do it. And then the private company banks do it because they’re expected to. But the government gets to say we didn’t do it. It was the private company that did it. And of course JP Morgan can decide who they want to have as customers, because they’re a private company. And so it’s this it’s this sleight of hand that happens it — basically it’s a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran. Kick you out of the financial system. And so this has been happening to all the crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years. This has been happening to a lot of the fintech entrepreneurs, anybody trying to start any kind of new banking service because they’re trying to protect the big banks.

Defund the CFPB

In February, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the Defund the CFPB Act, which would prohibit the Federal Reserve from funding the bureau.

“The CFPB is an unelected, unaccountable bureaucratic agency that has imposed burdensome and harmful regulations on American businesses, banks, and credit unions,” said Cruz in a statement. “It is an unchecked Obama-era executive arm and the Federal Reserve should not be transferring funds to it. Enacting this legislation would save American taxpayers billions of dollars and I call on the Senate to expeditiously take it up and pass it.”

Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) introduced the act in the House of Representatives.

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